'Space Oddity' In Space: Yes, Astronauts Are Still The Coolest Humans

This is Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" while floating around the International Space Station. You may have last seen the space station team walking around in outer space fixing stuff.

Yes, you will never do anything this cool. You could miniaturize Jay-Z and put him inside your iPod, inherit sixteen billion dollars, bring James Dean back to life, time-travel to 1968 to hip-nap Joan Holloway's hips, give birth to Miles Davis, and hire Stephen Hawking to help you develop the capability to spontaneously turn into a Corvette anytime you wanted, and you would not be this cool. Nothing is this cool.

Astronauts, right?

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Loving 'Gatsby' Too Much And Not Enough

Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

Daniel Smith/Warner Brothers Pictures Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

Daniel Smith/Warner Brothers Pictures

[I really hope it goes without saying that this piece about the film adaptation of a decades-old novel gives away the plot of a decades-old novel. But: Be aware.]

The sheer zazz that Baz Luhrmann introduces into The Great Gatsby is so imposing in quantity that it's surprising that it can get out of the way enough not to be the biggest problem in the movie. Luhrmann, after all, loves his swooping cameras and party scenes, and Gatsby gives him the best excuse for excess that there is: a story about excess.

Directorial playfulness turns out, in fact, to be one of the film's strengths, from an inventively exhausting party sequence to the mix of music on the soundtrack. The tracks from Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey have gotten most of the attention, and they're used well to remind us what such rich, young, perfect people might listen to now. But there's also era-appropriate material, including a clever segue from "Let's Misbehave" to "Ain't Misbehavin'," along with a perfect deployment of an overclocked "Rhapsody In Blue," which revels in its own stair-climbing excesses.

Where Luhrmann runs into trouble is not with his flashy glitz, but in his treatment of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel: he is too faithful on one hand and too cavalier on the other.

It's clear that everyone involved so loves the prose of the book that they felt the film could not exist without it — could not exist without, probably most importantly, Nick solemnly intoning, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Apparently convinced that this could only be a voice-over and a voice-over needed to be explained, Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce came up with not one but two framing devices: Nick telling the story of Gatsby to a psychiatrist and Nick tapping out the tale on a typewriter. (The final shots related to Nick's writing project are, it must be said, embarrassing. There is simply no other description that feels honest.)

There are liberties taken with the voice-over, in that it reads only tiny portions of the novel and both adds and subtracts in ways that are sometimes perplexing, and particularly because of the gaudy and inessential 3D, seeing words float off the screen as they are spoken aloud often places such emphasis on them that they instantly feel painfully distant.

That's what happens when Nick explains Gatsby's feelings as he hesitated to kiss Daisy and cement his bond with her. The words making up the assertion that Gatsby knew that after this his mind would never romp again like the mind of God flow naturally in the novel, but when Tobey Maguire reads them aloud and they appear in a studied typewriter font and begin to float off the screen, they feel forced and false and weighted with too much announcement of their own importance. The prose everyone was so determined to preserve is present, but with the blood drained from it.

More important, though, is the fact that the entire moral underpinning of Gatsby is lost because it is given a romantic aspect far beyond what should be there. The bluntest and best explanation I've seen came from Will Leitch at Deadspin, who described the Gatsby-Daisy scenes as "all soft-focused and romantic, like they're Romeo and Juliet rather than a deluded cursed megalomaniacal social climber and a spoiled old-money brat who just wants everything at no cost to her." Indeed.

Gatsby and Daisy in this film are doomed and tragic, and when he eventually dies and she doesn't attend his funeral, the sense is that she has given in to her sense of trapped misery, that she wasn't brave enough to leave her terrible husband for the man she really loved. What doesn't come through is the book's clear sense of Daisy's flighty irresponsibility, her entitled emptiness, and her ultimate willingness to walk away from all she's done and keep dancing.

In the film, the only real villain is Tom, Daisy's husband: he's the cheating, spiteful bully who sends his lover's spouse to kill his spouse's lover, not out of grief, but out of expediency. He hovers menacingly over Daisy's exit from the story in a way that drains her of blame and underscores the notion that Gatsby and Daisy are doomed victims of the same cruelties.

Luhrmann bestows upon actress Carey Mulligan such cinematographical adoration — he seems at times to be worshipping her every mole — that Daisy becomes paradoxically too genuine, too alive. At one critical juncture, where the book's Daisy simply says that she's crying because she's never seen such beautiful shirts and the interpretation is left to the reader, the movie's Daisy is allowed to suffer and stammer and extravagantly feel, while Nick explains how she's weighted down by her love of Gatsby, before she makes that rather silly statement about the shirts. Daisy in the book is a figure of vexing remove, which is part of what makes her so hard to get right in a film. And while Mulligan plays some pained, tormented woman quite beautifully at times, it isn't really Daisy Buchanan.

But no character is let off the hook, freed from any indictment, quite like Nick Carraway himself. From the outset, Nick's narration keeps certain things and omits others: you hear Nick explain, as he does in the novel's first paragraphs, that his father told him not to judge people, but you don't hear him explain that as a result of what he considers his profoundly understanding nature, people were constantly boring him with their stories and confessions. In the book, while he acknowledges it's "snobbish" to say so, he believes himself an unusually good man: "A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."

Tobey Maguire's Nick is not a man who only faux-apologetically admits to snobbery. He's a purely naïve, moon-faced innocent, just coming to the big city to make his way in the world and being sucked under by — you guessed it — Tom Buchanan, who introduces him to all things decadent. This does not seem to be a guy who could plausibly have gone to war, given that he seems shocked by jazz music. Part of it is a casting problem, since Maguire never seems older than about 17 and oozes boyhood no matter his age. It's what made him so perfect for Pleasantville long ago and made him such a good Peter Parker even recently. But he is not a very persuasive hard-partying veteran growing grizzled and bitter.

Nick becomes Gatsby's confidante, his only friend, the only person who clearly sees the folly of what Gatsby is doing — and eventually, in a complete abandonment of one of the critical pieces of the novel's ending, Nick becomes the only person Gatsby has in the world.

Gatsby, very nicely played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a role that, for once, steers into rather than away from his gorgeousness, is the only really interesting person here. That means that Nick's extravagant (and exaggerated) devotion to him makes Nick seem far more noble, far more deserving of sympathy, than he should be. In the book, Nick comes off as something of a wealth-intoxicated hanger-on who's far too willing to complain about rich people while eating their food and drinking their booze and eavesdropping on their drama — not that he knows this about himself. But here, he is the one good, kind man left in America.

When this story closes, it takes quite an act of piecing together to remember that as Tom and Daisy exit their East Egg home, they are doing so having directly or indirectly killed three people with their pettiness and fundamentally unserious way of approaching other humans. Two people born into privilege have mercilessly killed three people born into poverty, and somehow, that class commentary is invisible. The love story is all there is, and nothing is left of what is, at best, Fitzgerald's deep ambivalence about the American dream.

In a recent piece for Vulture called "Why I Despise The Great Gatsby," Kathryn Schulz explained that she's always found the book an utter bore, largely because she's so indifferent to Gatsby and Daisy, "the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn." But Gatsby and Daisy in the book are not a great, redemptive romance — Daisy is vacant, and Gatsby is delusional and chasing a fantasy. She also sees Nick as a dully passive "innocent bystander," rather than the fully participating scold he really is. If she's wrong about the book, it's because she's describing the story differently than it strikes most readers (and some discussions of her piece agree).

In a sense, Luhrmann has filmed Schulz's Gatsby: centered on the romance as grand and beautiful, unwilling to hold Nick (or really anyone else) accountable. That's what makes it troubling. The direction, the acting, the soundtrack, the sparkle and majesty — these things are assets and should have made the story work. But they don't, because the screenplay loves the book both too much and too little.

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At The Movies, A Swirl Of Style And Substance

Light It Up: Director Baz Luhrmann (right, with stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan on the set of The Great Gatsby) brought a lush visual sensibility to a tale whose tone not everyone thinks of as epic.

Matt Hart/Warner Bros. Pictures

Here's a movie pitch: A celebrated millionaire, known for public extravagance, lives right on the water in a fabulous mansion. He's smooth but reckless, drives like a maniac, has a powerful enemy and — despite a rep as a playboy — has only one girlfriend, who barely registers on-screen.

You're the producer, so whaddya think? Does his story require lavish digital effects, swooping cameras, a rap soundtrack and the full-on 3-D treatment?

If I tell you his name is Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man, probably yes, right?

What if his name is Jay Gatsby?

Baz Luhrmann's new film version of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wistful novel about love and longing on Long Island, really unleashes the roar in the Roaring '20s. It has songs by Beyonce and Jay-Z (who's also a producer); was filmed in 3-D, which renders its cocktail-party confetti pretty spectacular; and features soaring shots of a digitized 1920s New York, digitized mansions, even digitized mountains of coal-furnace refuse in a dump that Fitzgerald called the Valley of Ashes.

Everything about the film is overstuffed, overdecorated and constantly in motion, including passages from the novel's text that materialize on-screen. It's the Great American Novel as fever dream, and if emotions and character get lost in all the disco-ball glitz, well, how could they not?

Now, if we want movies to be surprising, and not look and sound like the cookie-cutter clones we're always complaining blockbusters are, we have to allow directors lots of latitude. And Luhrmann is hardly alone in bringing a distinctive personal style to material that doesn't seem a natural fit.

Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) recently turned the great Russian novel Anna Karenina into an oddly stagey extravaganza — meaning he placed much of it literally onstage, sometimes behind velvet curtains. Wright's driving idea was that Russian aristocrats were mimicking Western European royalty, essentially performing for the Russian public; by making that notion literal, he gave what has been a frequently filmed story a deliriously distinctive feel.

More recently, action director Michael Bay took his first shot at an intimate story after a slew of Transformers sequels, and what he did in Pain & Gain was, um ... also distinctive: He basically took what might have been an amusing three-guys-and-a-scam plot and bludgeoned it into submission with machine-gun editing, smash zooms and every other trick in the blockbuster playbook.

Sometimes, though, a little well-placed gimmickry is exactly what's needed. At the outset of the upcoming documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks — which sounds dry as dust, right? — director Alex Gibney shows us not stolen documents but what looks like the Milky Way: a starry firmament of tiny dots that swirl and coalesce and then swirl away again. It's a visual motif he uses throughout the film, a representation of the flow of information on the Internet, and though it's completely made up, it's tremendously effective in suggesting how impossible to control that information is once it's out there on the Web.

The Bang-Bang Club: Pain & Gain, with Anthony Mackie, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson as three guys on a heist, is a coulda-been-nimble caper that got Michael Bay-ified on the way to the multiplex.

Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount Pictures The Bang-Bang Club: Pain & Gain, with Anthony Mackie, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson as three guys on a heist, is a coulda-been-nimble caper that got Michael Bay-ified on the way to the multiplex.

Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount Pictures

So you won't hear me argue for reining directors in. Well, maybe Michael Bay, a little. But not someone like Luhrmann, who in Gatsby employs a lot of the same tricks he used successfully in Moulin Rouge. As he told NPR's Scott Simon quite persuasively this past weekend, everything he did was a deliberate, thought-through choice, from the 3-D to the rap songs.

For some people, it will doubtless work swimmingly. And even though I'm less enthusiastic about it, I also know this won't be the last screen word on Fitzgerald's words. There've been five film Gatsbys already — the first of them silent and in black and white.

And with film techniques forever changing, maybe someday — maybe with holograms — someone will figure out how to make this great (and supposedly unfilmable) American novel into the great American film.

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Mom's X-Ray Vision Also Sees The Best In Us

Mothers somehow know when we've been bad, but when times are tough, they also have our back.

iStockphoto.com Mothers somehow know when we've been bad, but when times are tough, they also have our back.

iStockphoto.com

Mothers have eyes in the back of their heads. They may not show up on X-rays, but they're there.

Like a lot of youngsters, I used to get my mother to turn her head so I could search through her hair for the eyeballs she claimed to have back there, telling her, "No you don't! No you don't!" But when I'd scamper off to another part of the apartment and pick up an ashtray or fiddle with the window blinds, I'd hear my mother's voice ring out, "I can see you! I know what you're up to!"

Mothers seem to see not only what we're up to, but also what a pediatrician may have missed, or what a teacher doesn't understand. I'm not sure that I believe in intuition, but I devoutly believe that mothers have eyes in the back of their heads.

Mothers possess singular vision. They can look at what the rest of the world may see as a sullen, snarling teenager and view them, through some other set of eyes, as the infant they used to carry and cuddle, the child who babbled on their lap and laughed, and the person they're sure we're struggling to become.

Mothers don't always think we're right. In fact, they know better — better than anyone. No one has heard more of our cunning excuses. But mothers are the ones who remember our tears and nightmares. Mothers can always see through to our innocence.

Lots of us look at a child's finger painting and profess to recognize a burgeoning Picasso in the smears and thumbprints (maybe Picasso's mother saw Renoir in young Pablo's pictures). But mothers never stop seeing the Picasso in us — the promise of potential — even if we've disappointed or squandered it. Seeing that promise in their eyes can fortify us when we're disheartened.

To be sure, mothers also see just where they can sting us when they want to. My hair is now more gray — excuse me, silver — than my mother's. I'm not sure how she's managed that. But when I told her not long ago that I was proud of my silvering hair, she asked, "Is it supposed to make me proud, too?" Yeow.

The eyes that mothers have in the back of their head see their children at all ages, all at once. It is the special vision of mothers, and I've never gotten a better bit of advice — about the news business, art or life — then when my mother would see someone panhandling on the street, or unshaven and mumbling on the subway, and tell me, "Remember: They were once a baby that a mother loved."

That special vision makes mothers our advocates for life. Everyone should have one.

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'Venus And Serena': Champs Atop Their Game

Serena Williams (left) and her sister Venus Williams in action during their first-round doubles match on Day 2 at Wimbledon in 2010.

Hamish Blair/Getty Images via Magnolia Pictures

Venus and Serena

Rated PG-13 for some strong language

With: Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Oracene Price, Richard Williams, Anna Wintour, Chris Rock, Billie Jean King, John McEnroe

What's left to know about Venus and Serena Williams? Probably not much that the tennis titans would be willing to share, given how heavily exposed they've been already, and how eager the press has been to wedge the sisters into ready-made narratives about race, celebrity and the daughters of a Svengali.

The lively if slightly worshipful new documentary Venus and Serena breaks little new ground in this regard. And maybe it doesn't matter, given the size of the personalities who leap out of the well-rehearsed, up-from-Compton tale of two sisters who took a white, upper-middle-class sport by the ears and shook it hard on their own terms.

For that part, producer-directors Maiken Baird and Michelle Major rely heavily on well-known news footage, sprinkled with commentary from celebrities like Bill Clinton, John McEnroe and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who say pretty much what you'd expect them to say about the sisters' agile grace and disciplined professionalism under pressure.

Comedian Chris Rock nails the sisters' boisterously uncompromising personal style and pride in their race: "Their braids are not country-club black," he says. "They are black-black."

In part that sense of self and heritage, so evident when the Williams women exploded onto the tennis scene in their early teens, comes from the flamboyant father who, for better and worse, shaped their careers. Born into abject poverty in Louisiana, Richard Williams moved to Los Angeles and built his own security company before devoting himself to shaping a gold-plated career for his daughters. We see him admit in a television interview to not being terribly interested in tennis for its own sake.

"I wanted for both of them to become No. 1 in the world," he says, grinning. That worked out pretty well, but Venus and Serena is also long on the details of how Williams supported, protected, bullied and prodded his two girls into becoming champions.

Barely into adolescence in footage dating back to the early '90s, the girls seem none the worse for the intense, unorthodox training regimen their father put them through, which included ballet, jazz and throwing rackets (and, later, pole-dancing), in addition to the rigors imposed by a fleet of top-tier coaches, none more demanding than Richard himself.

A serial womanizer who fathered so many kids that one sister can't remember all their names on camera, Richard makes for great copy. But Baird and Major also scored interviews with the Williams sisters and other family members, and Venus and Serena is most compelling as a portrait of domestic solidarity. Given the possibilities for friction in a clan divided by parentage, talent, wealth distribution, and the loss of one sister in a Compton shooting, that's either pretty astonishing or a diplomatic gloss on the Williams family's internal politics.

Certainly they come across as an intensely loyal gang. Long divorced from Richard, Venus and Serena's mother, Oracene, remains central to their lives and careers, and the source of their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses. We see her patiently seeing off idiotic questions from a reporter about "grunting" on the court, and commenting delightedly on the several women who co-exist within Serena — including a homegirl they call Taquanda, who periodically emerges to yell at recalcitrant umpires.

There's unqualified support from sisters and half-sisters unfazed by an interviewer's attempt to draw them out on the question of bloodlines and conflict. "We're black," says Venus and Serena's older sister Isha, firmly. "We don't do that."

As for Venus and Serena themselves, they seem as tight as two peas in a pod, which is remarkable for siblings compelled by their careers to be partners and rivals all at the same time. Romantic attachments come and go, but Venus and Serena are essentially a couple who live together, work out together, play together and, to judge by this film, would rather spend time in each other's company than be with anyone else. Together they have somehow figured out how to overcome the fact that Serena, a force of nature who has taken her father's competitive aggression more fully onboard than has her older sister — has achieved more success on the court.

Venus and Serena focuses mainly on the 2011 tennis season, when both were recovering from serious illnesses: Serena suffered a pulmonary embolism, while Venus was diagnosed with Sjogren's syndrome. Despite all this, and the fact that the two have hit their early 30s, their astonishing "comebacks" separately and together at Wimbledon and the Olympics make for a triumphalist ending any sports documentarian would pray for.

That's fun, and watching the sisters' beauty and casual physical grace on and off the court is always a trip. Yet some will come away thinking that the Williams family has grown so skilled at managing their public image that perhaps no filmmaker will ever get between the cracks.

Me, I wanted to know what these two remarkable young women will obsess about once the whole world has stopped watching, whether they will always be together — and what it would really feel like to be one of their much less famous siblings. We'll probably never know, except in someone else's future fiction feature.

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The Movie Mark McKinney Has 'Seen A Million Times'

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney's favorite scene from My Neighbor Totoro.

The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney's credits include the TV shows Slings and Arrows, Kids In The Hall and Less Than Kind — currently airing on HBO Canada. The movie he could watch a million times is Hayao Miyazaki's anime film, My Neighbor Totoro.

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney.

George Pimentel/Getty Images

On what he thought when he first saw My Neighbor Totoro

"My first impression of the film was that it just took such care with setting up the world."

On why the scene with Totoro at the bus stop is his favorite

"It's a fantastically wonderful wild-mind moment, and you know it doesn't really follow any story, there's no particular reason for it, but it's there to bond the kids to Totoro, and it just works beautifully. And before you know it, that's completely sucked you into the story, and that's what all of Miyazaki's movies do for me."

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Sandwich Monday: Tamale Spaceship

NPR

Chicago's Tamale Spaceship food truck happened to land near our office this Sandwich Monday. We considered it our duty as hungry earthlings to eat as many tamales as it takes to ensure we're never called up for NASA's astronaut program.

The tamale heroes who run Tamale Spaceship wear Mexican wrestling masks. They do this to intimidate you into spending $4 on a single tamale and to protect themselves from flying tamale debris.

Object larger than it appears (Ian has giant hands).

NPR Object larger than it appears (Ian has giant hands).

NPR

Miles: I think an entire fleet of Tamale Spaceships could reignite American interest in the space program.

Robert: Houston, we have a cholesterol problem.

Miles: One small step for man, one giant leap for pant sizes.

Eva: I was a little offended when I went to space after eating one of these and there was still gravity.

NPR

Mike: I hope in space, someone can hear me ask for more.

Robert: Major Tom would have a hard time stepping out of his capsule if he were aboard the Tamale Spaceship.

Mike: Yeah, Hal would totally open the pod bay doors for these guys.

Eva: I think they have to count down from 10,000 to lift this spaceship off the ground.

Tamales are a lot like bananas, except better because they're tamales.

NPR

Miles: This is a clear rip-off of my chain of Schnitzel Submarines.

Eva: The pork one is delicious. I'm not sure how I feel about the one filled with losers from the last big wrestling match.

Robert: If I could surround all my food in masa I'd die happy. And I'd be dead right now.

[The verdict: Four dollars per tamale is steep, but that's about 1/1 millionth of what it costs to go to space as a space tourist. So consider it a good deal. Also, they're enormous.]

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me.

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A Fresh Answer To Vermeer's Mystery

The Procuress, painted by Johannes Vermeer in 1656, hangs in a Dresden, Germany, museum in 2004. While this particular work is not in question, Benjamin Binstock argues that other pieces attributed to the Dutch master are by an apprentice and a member of his household.

Norbert Millauer/AFP/Getty Images The Procuress, painted by Johannes Vermeer in 1656, hangs in a Dresden, Germany, museum in 2004. While this particular work is not in question, Benjamin Binstock argues that other pieces attributed to the Dutch master are by an apprentice and a member of his household.

Norbert Millauer/AFP/Getty Images

There are two excellent ideas at the heart of art historian Benjamin Binstock's beautiful and strange new book Vermeer's Family Secrets. The first is taken from a Nietzsche quote:

"We have learned to love all things that we now love."

The second is that you can't recognize a painting for what it is just by looking at it. Getting to know, and so coming to love, a work of art, or the work of an artist, is itself hard work. Binstock compares it to bringing a distant planet into focus. It takes a lot of knowledge, and a great deal of careful attention to what others (scientists, historians, critics) have learned and thought, to be able to see what is out there.

Now, imagine a family: the father is a painter. The mother, the children and the maid are his models. The father works at home. The art changes and develops as his models grow up and the relationships among them evolve. In time, one of his models, a child, takes up the brush and becomes the father's assistant and then his apprentice.

The apprentice is confined, literally and figuratively, to the materials of the father — the same interior scenes, the same pigments, the same bolts of canvass. The apprentice seeks to imitate the master. But the master is also influenced, or even inspired, by the work of the pupil, just as both of them share models because, after all, they share a single studio, home and family.

This, Binstock claims, is exactly the situation in the Vermeer household.

Scholars have long found it difficult to come up with a coherent story of Vermeer's development, or even of the order in which the very small number of extant paintings (some 30 odd) were made. Some of the paintings just don't fit. They depict the same cast of characters, occupying the same rooms and wearing the same clothes. They're made out of the same paints, using the same basic materials and techniques. But they look different. They lack the technical facility and compositional understanding of the others, even as they are also, sometimes, free-spirited and vigorous — worth loving! — in a way that is not typical of Vermeer.

Binstock is not alone in noticing that a good sixth of Vermeer's pictures don't seem to fit. He may be alone in advancing an account that explains not only their differences, but also their similarities. He says that, contrary to what has been widely supposed, Vermeer did have an apprentice: his daughter Maria (of pearl earring fame). Binstock also offers plausible explanations of why it has taken until now for us to realize this.

First, in the Delft of Vermeer's day, there was no requirement that children be registered as apprentices. Second, girls and women were not encouraged and Maria would have been expected, or perhaps required, to give up painting at marriage. Hence there is no sequel to her work in her father's studio. Finally, Vermeer's family paid the bills with the money from his paintings. Indeed, they traded paintings for food. Vermeer's widow may have deliberately passed off Maria's works as by the master himself in order to pay off debts.

In this view, Maria, and to some degree Vermeer himself, were complicit in this. It was in everyone's interest to keep Maria's apprenticeship a secret. (As it was in their interest to keep other things secret, such as the family's illegal adherence to Catholicism.)

Contemporary scholars scoff at approaches to art that lean too heavily on cults of personality or biographical detail. After all, when work is good, it stands on its own and doesn't require a romantic backstory. Quite right. But Binstock makes the case that, where Vermeer is concerned, the family isn't backstory. Vermeer painted his family. And his family painted right back.

Nor can Binstock be accused of making excuses for Vermeer, as if explaining away his bad paintings. Maria's paintings — if that is what they are — are very good. They are genuine artistic responses to the work of her father and, Binstock shows, they compelled her father to respond to them as works of art in turn, actively influencing his choices and development. She never equalled her father. But then her apprenticeship was very brief. It is truly extraordinary what she accomplished in a small number of years.

If Binstock is right, then seven paintings widely taken to be painted by Johannes Vermeer — and that fetch prices at auction in the millions of dollars — are not by his hand at all.

Which is of course not to say that these paintings are not Vermeers. They are by a Vermeer, after all: Maria Vermeer.

The important and conceptually intriguing question raised by Binstock's book — and, if he is right, raised by Vermeer's oeuvre itself — is this:

What is it to be a Vermeer, anyway?

With millions of dollars potentially hanging in the balance, it will be very interesting to see how art history, as a field, responds to Binstock's challenge.

The New York Humanities Institute is sponsoring a free, day-long symposium on Binstock's book — Vermeer's Daughter? — on Saturday, May 18, in Manhattan. Binstock will make his case. A very impressive cast of writers and artists will respond.

You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

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Music, Inside Out

What would it be like to be a string that made music? Not anything simple, like a guitar string or a cello string, but a magical string, a sine curve that's taut then loose, that doubles then doubles again, that sheds then dissolves into showers of notes — a flaming, sighing, looping, dissolving string. Curious?

That's what we've got here, from New York's School of Visual Arts grad student Daniel Sierra. This is his masters' thesis. This is music as you might imagine it in a magical laboratory under a magical microscope. Really close in.

Happy Weekend.

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Preserving The Motherhood Advice And Memories Of A Mom

Carol Kirsch and her daughter, Rebecca Posamentier, visited StoryCorps in 2008. Posamentier visited again recently.

StoryCorps Carol Kirsch and her daughter, Rebecca Posamentier, visited StoryCorps in 2008. Posamentier visited again recently.

StoryCorps

In 2008, Rebecca Posamentier visited StoryCorps with her mother, Carol Kirsch.

"My mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and I was hoping to get her voice and her thoughts on tape before she couldn't express them anymore," Posamentier said recently during a second visit to StoryCorps.

Kirsch died in March 2011, but during that first visit, Posamentier chatted with her mother about well, motherhood.

"Um, Mom was very insecure, because she had polio as a child, and she had a limp for pretty much all her life," Kirsch said about her own mother. "She felt that she was not whole somehow, so I had a rocky relationship with Mom. And I was afraid to have children for many years, but I'm so glad I did."

At the time of the first StoryCorps visit, Posamentier was in the late stages of pregnancy with her first child. She asked her mother what she wanted to share with her granddaugher once she was born.

"Well, I'd want her to know that she's going to be very loved," Kirsch said. "And, you know, I've told you that I was worried that my Alzheimer's would get worse, and that I wouldn't be able to spend time I want with her. I really hope I can do that for a while."

And, for the first two years the grandmother and granddaughter were very close.

Kirsch with her granddaughter Sophie.

StoryCorps Kirsch with her granddaughter Sophie.

StoryCorps

"But Sophie was so little — she was only 3 when [Kirsch] died — that I don't know how much she'll really, truly remember," Posamentier says today. "The sad part for me is that she modeled everything for us."

A couple of days before Posamentier left for college Kirsch told her about how her parents had not necessarily been supportive. So she told Posamentier that no matter what happens, even if it's horrible, she should still tell her about it. She would help her to get out of whatever situation.

"Those are the qualities of motherhood that I want to have, too," Posamentier said in 2008.

Now that she's a parent, Posamentier says she would love to talk things out with her mom.

"And that's what I miss the most right now."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon.

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Polley's 'Stories': A Family Saga Strikingly Spun

A young Sarah Polley and her actor father, Michael Polley, on a long-ago day; the photo is one of many family memories that surface in Stories We Tell, a superb meditation on dramatizing memory from the director of Away from Her.

Roadside Attractions

Stories We Tell

Director: Sarah PolleyGenre: DocumentaryRunning Time: 108 minutes

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements involving sexuality, brief strong language and smoking.

With: Michael Polley, Sarah Polley, Diane Polley

(Recommended)

Sarah Polley grew up the fifth of five children in a Canadian theatrical family. Her father, Michael, is a transplanted British actor; her mother, Diane, was an actress and casting director. No wonder Sarah feels her family's narrative has the stuff of drama.

"I'm interested in the way we tell stories about our lives," she says in the film, "about the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down."

Prophetic words, those.

But let's start from the film's beginning. Polley's mom died in 1990 of cancer, and her father remembers bonding then with his youngest daughter.

"I felt closer to you than I ever felt about the other children," he tells her, explaining that he'd always shared her siblings' attention with their mom. After her death, "suddenly there was myself and this little girl. There were four or five very close years we had together then."

Polley in the present day, with her Super-8 camera.

Roadside Attractions Polley in the present day, with her Super-8 camera.

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In Polley's documentary, that recollection is accompanied by home-movie images of them building a snowman — conventional documentary footage, you might say. Other moments are less conventional. There are stops and starts in the voice-over — because Dad isn't just a character in this story, you see; he's the narrator, too, which gives the film a very intimate feel.

That only gets enhanced when her brothers and sisters drop one story on Sarah they might not tell someone else.

"I remember Johnny saying [that] your father might be someone that Mum had acted with in a play," one brother observes. "I remember we talked about how you didn't look like Dad," a sister says. "And Dad joked about it."

Those reminiscences about an elusive mother turn into a search for clues that will literally explain how this filmmaker came into the world. And though that might keep another director occupied, it's just the start here, because no two children, no two friends — no two lovers, even — paint the same portrait of Diane Polley. Mum was adventuresome but trapped, says a kid, dutiful but wild, says a confidant, talented (maybe) and unfulfilled (sometimes) and by many accounts a shy extrovert.

And as her youngest daughter processes all these contradictions, an exercise in family navel-gazing becomes something more meta — less about the stories themselves than about the often uproarious ways in which people tell stories.

Including the filmmaker, whose previous fictional treks behind the camera — the Alzheimer's love story Away from Her, for instance — have hardly been conventional. Here, she trips up your expectations right through the final fade.

Seriously, one of the most jaw-dropping revelations occurs halfway through the final credits. All of which makes the stories Sarah Polley tells in Stories We Tell an enormously intriguing lot. (Recommended)

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Watch The First Trailer For ABC's 'Avengers' Follow-Up

Over the weekend, ABC posted a trailer for Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., its fall show (time slot and premiere date to come) that jumps off from Marvel's Avengers universe, as seen in all kinds of movies that have made all kinds of money.

The series, created by Avengers director and TV veteran Joss Whedon, focuses on Coulson (Clark Gregg), who is apparently doing a lot better than he might have been last time you saw him, by whatever good fortune. Now, he's starring in the show with the most typing-unfriendly title since CBS tried to make us type all those symbols before the words "My Dad Says."

As you'll see, they don't want you to miss the connection to Marvel, since the screen says "Marvel" at the beginning and 10 seconds later says "Marvel's 'The Avengers' — Marvel."

So in order to make the largest number of friends, you should refer to it as "that Batman show," is what I'm saying. (Not really.)

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Black In America: A Story Rendered In Grayscale

American literature has plenty of coming-of-age novels. What we need more of, judging by the strengths of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new book, are novels about coming to America. In particular, books that address our biggest problems, in this case, race. Because things natives don't see about themselves often stand out like neon to foreign eyes. And if you think racism expired when President Obama was elected, this is perhaps not — or absolutely is — the book for you.

In Americanah, a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, moves to the United States for school. She leaves behind her boyfriend, Obinze, and her family, to live in various cities on the East Coast as she attends college and graduate school. It's a story of relocation, far-flung love, and life as an alien spread across three continents. It's also about the lonely but privileged perspective a stranger gains by entering a new culture. Indeed, it's more powerful than that in Americanah, because Ifemelu experiences America both as a black and African woman. In the U.S., those two identities combine for experiences dark and light that Adichie skillfully renders in grayscale.

The story begins with an electricity familiar to readers of Adichie's previous novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. That book, about the life of two sisters during the Nigerian-Biafran War, won the Orange Prize for Fiction six years ago. I'm still pressing it on strangers; it rests comfortably in my top five favorite books published in the decade.

Americanah's first chapters, mostly set during Ifemelu's childhood and teenage years in Nigeria, have a similar crackle. Describing a party at a local big man's house, Adichie writes of some aspirational guests, "They were wearing the uniform of the Lagos youngish and wealthyish — leather slippers, jeans and open-neck tight shirts, all with familiar designer logos — but there was, in their manner, the plowing eagerness of men in need."

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is also the author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun.

Beowulf Sheehan/Random House

After Ifemelu lands in the United States, she becomes, among other things, a blogger, writing funny, punchy updates about black life in America — from hair styles to politics — intended for America's blacks, non-blacks, and non-American blacks. She writes, "Of all their tribalisms, Americans are most uncomfortable with race. If you are having a conversation with an American, and you want to discuss something racial that you find interesting, and the American says, 'Oh, it's simplistic to say it's race, racism is so complex,' it means they just want you to shut up already."

But about Ifemelu's offline existence, from surviving fraternity parties to finding employment, Adichie's storytelling is surprisingly flat. We get explanations in lieu of action; discourse, but little drama. Of one character: "Ifemelu knew that for a long time afterwards, she would not unwrap from herself the pashmina of the wounded." Ifemelu's boyfriend, Obinze, leaves Nigeria too, and his story, working in a British warehouse, has a much stronger heartbeat. But ultimately the novel suffers the absence of a tougher editor.

Adichie's goals on the page, however, are noble and her hard work obvious. When Ifemelu returns to Lagos, "the heaps of rubbish ... rose on the roadsides like a taunt. Commerce thrummed too defiantly." It's that type of evocative power, transporting my imagination while keeping my feet firmly on the ground, that has me looking forward to Adichie's books for years to come.

Rosecrans Baldwin's latest book, Paris I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down, comes out in paperback next month.

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Iron Man' And Giving Up

NPR

On this week's show, we're joined by our friend Matt Thompson, who was around last summer for The Avengers and who here helps us tackle Iron Man 3. We chat about the importance of the suit, the quality of the villainy, and whether Robert Downey, Jr. should win an Oscar. (Okay, the last one is me.)

After that, we chat about the things that we've given up on, some of which might surprise you. (I am ready for your angry e-mails.)

As always, we close the show with what's making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about a performance that he rediscovered as part of helping me with a piece I wrote this week. Matt is happy about a video to which he can't help dancing. Glen is happy about a podcast that gives him nothing but happiness and gave him, believe it or not, his "jock jam." (Really.) I manage to be happy about a bunch of things this week, including a new IFC show, a couple of great moviegoing experiences, and the great disdain of Harry Connick, Jr.

Find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Glen, Matt, Trey, Jess, and our esteemed producer emeritus and music director, Mike Katzif.

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A Mother's Day Gift That Makes You Feel Better, Too

iStockphoto.com

Dear reader,

Mother's Day is upon us and I'm here to share some news with you. While there's nothing wrong with a well-chosen gift, recent research in psychology suggests your time might be better spent writing a well-crafted card to mom.

A study by Toepfer, Cichy and Peters, published last year in the Journal of Happiness Studies, found that writing letters of gratitude increased the letter-writer's life satisfaction and happiness. Doing so also decreased symptoms associated with depression.

The researchers recruited 219 adults to participate in the study. Over the course of four weeks, people in the experimental group wrote three letters of gratitude expressing their appreciation for one or more individuals. Participants were asked "to be reflective, write expressively, and compose letters from a positive orientation while avoiding 'thank you notes' for material gifts." The letters were mailed to their intended recipients at the conclusion of the study.

Participants in a control group were not instructed to write letters, but — along with those in the experimental group — completed tests assessing their life satisfaction, happiness and depressive symptoms at the start and end of the four-week period.

The researchers found positive pre- to post-test changes for participants who wrote letters, but not for those in the control group. Specifically, the letter-writers fared better on measures of life satisfaction (e.g., agreeing with "I am satisfied with life"), happiness (e.g., more likely to select "Compared to most of my peers, I consider myself a very happy person") and depression (e.g., less likely to indicate that in the past week, "I was bothered by things that usually don't bother me").

You knew your mother was right (they always are!) all those years ago when she taught you the value of good manners. Now science confirms it! So, it's time to put pen to paper for a heartfelt letter of gratitude and appreciation. It'll do you both some good.

With heartfelt thanks to my own wonderful mother,

Tania

You can keep up with more of what Tania Lombrozo is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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